Peel, Peek, Touch, Rub: Reading Yoko Ono’s “Grapefruit”

In the early sixties, Ono became a one-woman force, a potent curator of New York’s downtown counter-cultural scene.

Photograph by George Maciunas / MOMA

MOMA’s “Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971,” which opened last week, allows audiences just one John Lennon-conjuring piece at the entrance: Ono’s 1966 fruit-on-Plexiglass-pedestal sculpture, titled “Apple.” Depending on your record collection, the object may call to mind the Beatles’ recording imprint of the same name, which launched in 1968. From there, though, the museum turns back the clock, recreating the 1961 world of Ono’s much less talked-about—and arguably more important—New York loft, at 112 Chambers Street. In MOMA’s opening galleries, you’ll find recreations of Ono’s conceptual, audience-engaging works, such as “Painting to Be Stepped On,” and photos of Ono dancing with Robert Rauschenberg, or hanging out with the first-generation minimalist composer La Monte Young (whose programs for a music series hosted at Ono’s loft also line one of the gallery walls).

In 1961, Ono’s loft was the place to catch mixed-media performances starring a variety of names that would eventually become counter-culture legends, including the composer Terry Riley, the Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, and the contemporary-classical-piano virtuoso David Tudor. By providing a place for such a diverse range of post-Dada practices, Ono became a one-woman force, a potent curator of New York’s downtown scene. Even Duchamp himself paid a visit to 112 Chambers Street.

Images and audio documentation of this period fall far short of what one would like. Some of the composers Young championed at Ono’s loft, such as Terry Jennings, have tantalizingly slender discographies. And as with other suddenly historic modern-art scenes (such as Andy Warhol’s Factory), credit-taking regarding who-did-what-exactly complicated the relationships among key artists who might otherwise be pooling their archives. Included in MOMA’s exhibition book is a 1971 letter from Ono to the Fluxus ringleader George Maciunas, in which she sternly and righteously asserts her role in the programming that took place at her loft. “You shouldn’t write as if La Monte Young was the producer just because he has taken the credit for it,” she writes. Since Maciunas himself didn’t attend the series in 1961, Ono closes with a recommendation: “Don’t talk about what you don’t know.”

Any collective as puckish and as taken with impermanence as Fluxus naturally flirts with the loss of primary-source documentation. It’s precisely this inevitable erasure that makes MOMA’s decision to devote an entire gallery to a single Ono book—“Grapefruit,” her 1964 compendium of conceptual-art instructions—feel so crucial and rewarding.

Seeing the original edition is rare enough: copies of the first printing have been scarce for decades. (At the exhibit, all the pages from an early copy are posted around the perimeter of a large gallery). But something remarkable happens when Ono’s manuscript is placed alongside her paintings and sculptures: at last, we have a chance to see the continuum of Fluxus-era artistic practice in full, incorporating everything from an initial idea to the provisional executions of that same thought. We don’t have to lament the loss of “hard” objects such as paintings or sculptures—those are in the next room over. The viewer is asked to hold both the notional sketch and the “finished product” in mind, without choosing one over the other. This gets to the heart of what Ono and some members of the Fluxus movement were up to.

The original “Grapefruit” is split into five sections—Music, Painting, Event, Poetry, Object—with each page offering a conceptual direction for work yet to be created. Some of the restrained, Zen-like commands (such as “Leave a piece of canvas or finished painting on the floor or in the street”) had already been realized, by Ono, at the time of the book’s original publication. Many others, including most of the musical “event scores,” were not documented prior to the book’s release (or at least they were not documented in any publicly known form). After Ono married John Lennon, Simon & Schuster published a new edition of “Grapefruit,” though this version included some editorial revisions and additions—the most prominent among the latter being a short foreword authored by Lennon.

A first-edition copy of “Grapefruit.”

Courtesy Yoko Ono / MOMA

In the original “Grapefruit,” now on display at MOMA, two different trilogies of “pieces for orchestra” carry dedications “to La Monte Young,” whose name never appears in Simon & Schuster’s most recent edition of Ono’s book, published in 2000. (Also missing from the 2000 edition is the original dedication page, which listed several veterans of the 112 Chambers Street loft scene.) Dating from the summer and autumn of 1962, these commands for ensemble members read, in order: “Peel,” “Peek,” “Take off,” “Tear,” “Touch,” and “Rub.” (You can hear a realization of the full series in a performance by the Zeitgeist ensemble on the album “If Tigers Were Clouds,” along with other works surveyed from “eight decades of women in experimental music.”) At MOMA, we can now also see that Ono’s “Voice Piece for Soprano”—once memorably sung by a young Coco Hayley Gordon Moore—was originally dedicated to one Simone Morris, also known as the dancer Simone Forti (who recently performed at MOMA, herself).

The differences go beyond the name-checks. The bonus-track-style texts that Ono included in the 2000 Simon & Schuster reprint—which figure nowhere in MOMA’s exhibit—tended to feature a less meditative and more didactic literary style that can feel at odds with Ono’s earlier writing. Encountering the original event scores in proper order, one page at a time, and so close to galleries filled with Ono’s 2015 realizations of those same instructions (such as “Painting to Be Stepped On”), lends her provisional-fixed conceptual dyad a new depth. Neither “just” objects nor “merely” airy commands, the pieces in “Grapefruit” now encompass both possibilities simultaneously.

When viewed next to Ono’s audience-participation paintings, the “Grapefruit” instructions can also help us see the artist’s later, post-Lennon sloganeering in a different light. The couple’s famous mantra “War Is Over! If You Want It” can seem naive, particularly if you think of “wanting” as a passive endeavor. But as much as “Grapefruit” ’s thought experiments address small-bore human desires, they also call for the satisfaction of those impulses through action. The page of “Grapefruit” titled “A Plus B Painting” can actually lead to a painting, depending on the level of effort you put in.

It’s not difficult to imagine why a writer and publisher might cut all references to minimalist composers while adding a foreword written by a Beatle. But, in 2015, the artists’ names that show up in the original “Grapefruit” appear as more than footnotes. In fact, their joint presence offers a jolt of contemporary import, as conceptual themes and compositional styles with virtually no public profile back then have steadily gained purchase over the years. Young, for his part, is still active, and able to draw the crowds (and the coverage) that he deserves.

Likewise, the classical-music establishment has reached a point where conceptual works—such as excerpts from John Cage’s “Song Books”—can be performed on Carnegie Hall’s main stage, instead of in the venue’s smaller recital hall (now Weill Recital Hall), where Ono presented her own concerts in the nineteen-sixties. If a contemporary version of 1965’s “FluxOrchestra” were to be booked into the Weill space to play Ono “events” such as “Sky Piece to Jesus Christ,” I suspect that tickets would sell briskly. And if Young were somehow coaxed into participating again—the same way Eric Clapton re-created avant-rock history with the Plastic Ono Band, in 2010—the lines would likely stretch around 57th Street.

I did find myself wishing, at first, that MOMA had thought to pipe the sounds of “Pieces for Orchestra to La Monte Young” into the “Grapefruit” gallery—or else recordings of Terry Riley and Terry Jennings into the room that evokes the loft where those musicians played in 1961. But, before long, those potential fixed-media choices also came to seem unduly limiting. Better to go into the “Grapefruit” gallery stripped of as many associations as you can. Attempting to wed Ono’s work to other cultural touchstones is what has made getting a handle on her artistry so difficult for so long, after all. It’s a tricky concept to execute, but MOMA has restored the original context of Ono’s “Grapefruit,” while still allowing each individual page to speak in its own unbounded way.

Her paintings are on display next to the flowers she raised, at the New York Botanical Garden.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.